> I'll then go check salaries using a job hunting site for the same positions in SV and they pay the same or less after adjusting for cost of living

That's the problem. Salaries on job hunting sites are wildly inaccurate. Glassdoor lists FANG compensation as 2-3x less than what they actually pay.

Also, the important metric isn't COL adjusted income; it's the total amount of money that's left over to save/invest after all other expenses. So it doesn't matter that CA has high income tax or that rent costs $50k per year when you're still able to save significantly more than anywhere else in the U.S.

I made the move to the Bay Area with a family in my 30s. It’s not perfect, but we’re saving dramatically more than we could anywhere else. I don’t know how long we’ll stay, but at this rate 5 years would be enough to set us up really well almost anywhere else in the US.

I wish I’d gotten into software sooner. If you come out here at 22, live with roommates and stay until you’re 30, you probably take anywhere from $400-700k in savings with you to then have a much easier life somewhere else.

That’s why people do it, especially when they’re young.

Also in terms of math, you need to know that the big companies here pay about 50% via salary and the rest via bonus and stock, so the salary numbers you see are only the “live day to day” money. The other half of your income comes in big checks every quarter or so, which makes it easy to shovel that straight into savings.

Spending your entire life as a young adult doing that sounds dystopian. May that never become the norm.

Private, quiet space is a visceral need for some people and a frivolous luxury for others. In my experience it's very difficult for the people in these two groups to understand each other. A craving for solitude is an expensive trait, but one I have no qualms about indulging: after spending all day in a giant open floorplan and then commuting on a crush-loaded train, if there were Craigslist strangers in my home I'd be in hell.

It's better than spending your life as a young adult working degrading jobs and starving. In the broad scheme of things, being a programmer is not so bad.

Living in San Francisco, working at a big 5 tech company really isn't that bad. Even the "worst" of the bunch on the work life balance scale, only do around 60 hours a week. Most of them just do the standard 40 hrs a week, though.

So it really isn't giving up your youth or anything. And many young people even enjoy the city of San Francisco. It is a big city. Lots of stuff for young people to do...

Eh it depends, I live with a roommate because I choose to. We're friends, we do things together, it's nice.

I could live without one, my rent would be marginally more, though I'd still probably bank close to the same. But the social aspect is really nice.

Living with roommates by choice isn’t that bad. Needing to live with roommates for financial reasons when one really would rather have a private space to come home to is hell.

Under specific assumptions:

1) You don’t aspire to own a home here, as that will eat easily 100% or more of your savings.

2) You plan to spend your savings in a cheaper place.

USD is a convenient shorthand for purchasing power, but breaks down under huge regional COL differences. A $200k savings account in the Bay Area is like a $50k savings account elsewhere: about enough to think about setting up a middle-class grown-up lifestyle.

Unless you're talking about a home, 200k in the bay is more than 50k almost anywhere else. There are very few things that cost 4x more on regional differences, and housing may actually be the only one. (Other major expenses, like food, transit/gas, and leisure activities like travel or vacations are much less price elastic, 0-30% more)

But it would be irresponsible to take advantage of any of that, because one needs every last dollar saved towards housing.

Not really. 200k is a down payment on a million dollar home. Double that is a 2 million dollar home, which will let you buy in most places.

Thats achievable in 5 years for someone who is working towards that goal specifically, less if you have a partner who also works. Anecdotally, I know two couples (out of not many total) that purchased within 2 years of moving to the bay. One had some savings, and that plus the first years stock vests was enough for a down payment on a condo. The other took ~2 years to buy a home from very little prior savings, which was possible because both had decent incomes.

So I'm dubious as to the doom and gloom, at least for married professionals.

(Of course, this ignores the reality that for anyone not working in tech or 1-2 other fields, these are wholly out of the picture, and that's hugely problematic! But for the calculation of CoL for someone who is picking between tech companies, I think people overestimate the costs of the bay, and I'm not really sure why)

Sure, dual tech income families are doing fine. But with gender ratios as they are, not many of those can exist.

Remember that, as you save, housing appreciates. I've run the numbers; the lines only intersect at all for more conservative % increases, between 8 and 12 years out.

Both good points that I forgot to mention. I implicitly assumed most people would eventually move away from SV, but if you plan to stay there your whole life, then you'll have a much more difficult time buying a home and/or retiring. And having children adds a whole new dimension of financial difficulties.

It also adds a bunch of social difficulties, unless you try to pull of the entire make-bank/move-elsewhere cycle before they reach elementary school age. Once they are in school, they start making their own friendships and relationships, and it becomes much more impactful for everyone to make that move to the new low-cost area, leaving everything they know behind.

I can’t imagine what else I’d do “after” this. I intend to be with the industry for a full career; unless and until it moves, that means being here.

..and you´re lucky enough with the timing for the business cycle to give you that long.

Which probably won´t be the case for most people working there now.

If you're able to save 10% of your salary for retirement, you're a lot better off in raw dollar amount to work in SV and then move elsewhere at retirement.

> Is there some magic pool of jobs there that let you retired after 10 years that I am not seeing?

Yes there is, actually. It is called "working for one of the big 5 tech companies/or one of the unicorns".

200k+ total comp is the norm for someone with a couple years experience working at one of these places.

And god knows how much the people with 10+ years make. A Google L6 (staff engineer) makes something like 450k?

Note that Google (and presumably the others) pay for performance, not tenure. 10 years in you might be L8-9 and earn a million or be L4 and, well, not earn a million ;)

Source: I'm keeping a pace of 1 promo / 2 years in Google. I've seen people going both faster and slower (and some stopping at L4, because why bother).

Promos at Google get exponentially harder at each level, which also means the mean time between promos increases as you go up. L9 is Senior Director, meaning you're managing hundreds of people, and hitting that in 10 years is highly unlikely.

The last person I knew who managed thousands of people hit that after 7 years. It's not the norm, but it happens.

And with 15 years of experience I was being groomed to be promoted from an L6 to L7 "Uber Team Lead"... it wasn't easy and wasn't coasting, took a ton of very hard very impactful work... but it's possible for a mere mortal.

You don’t even need to work for a big-n company to make 200k TC with a few years experience, if that’s your goal.

Your fortune 500 company pays $250-400k total compensation to young coders (2-9 yrs experience)? Which company is it? You don't? Then you're not paying more or less the same...

Really? Who does that? Bit late to figure it out now. I'm almost 40 and I make way less than that range with 20 years of embedded/hpc c++ experience. But still curious.

Throway for obv. reasons.

Google, Facebook, Netflix, Linkedin, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc. typically^H^H^H often pay $400-500k for someone with that much experience who can be a team lead.

If you can be a more senior architect-type person, or a manager who manages managers, 7 figures can be within reach (though not easy).

This is why you're losing coders to Silicon Valley. If you want a big house, then yeah, that will be $2M and you might be better off making $150k in the midwest. If you're happy with a two bedroom apartment for $4k-$5k/mo, there is no place better.

People end up in non-tech business roles, technology verticals or in other places.

For good or ill, people tend to fall out of the funnel as they hop from job to job.

I think you don't understand the math here. If you are in your 20s, single, and making six figures, you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent and it's quite nice because you have so much extra capital to spend on top of saving.

And there are things to spend it on here. Heck many in their thirties do this.

Meanwhile in the south you can make those same six figures and have a 5 bedroom house with a mortgage of 1.5k

Or live in a nice area for 800 a month. Or live in a shit area for 400.

SV math does not work out. You are taxed to much. Pay to high rent and have the pleasure of needing a shit map to walk in your city.

I keep seeing this same argument about getting to pay 1.5k to live with a bunch of other people to save some money.

No thanks.

> Meanwhile in the south you can make those same six figures and have a 5 bedroom house with a mortgage of 1.5k

Or in my case, a 5 bedroom house with a mortgage of $850.

We paid ~$125k for ours, in a semi-rural area, last year.

It blows my mind that people would prefer to live in the Valley or elsewhere. I put in my five years in a higher COL area (Charlottesville, VA) to build my earning potential - and then I moved back to where I grew up as soon as I was confident that I could hold down a well-paying remote dev position and could get another one if the need arose.

The disparity between the coasts and "middle America" is insane. Working for a company based in the LA area, I make literally 2-3x what my colleagues are making working for local companies - while my employer pays me probably around half of what they'd have to pay for similar talent local to them.

Very few people in the South are making 6 figs out of college, even fewer are able to save six figures a year out of college. People in the bay can do that.

And that assumes you want a 5 bedroom house, I have zero interest in that right now. Too much space to take care of. Why would I do that?

And why would I go somewhere with fewer things to do. I attend social events 2-3 times a week. I've checked elsewhere, that would drop to 2x a month in Atlanta and less in a less populated area, unless I picked up more hobbies.

What social events do you enjoy that you don’t classify as hobbies? Eg what social events does sv have that Atlanta doesn’t? Are you counting tech as all encompassing lifestyle?

They are hobbies, my point is just that currently my hobbies (social dance, among others) have a large enough presence that I could literally attend a different social partner dance event every night of the week while sticking to blues and swing. I'd be double booked most nights. Now I don't do that because they're spread all over the bay (SF, Oakland, mid peninsula and South Bay, hell there's even one in Sacramento), but there are enough close to me that I can do 2-3 a week no issue.

In Atlanta theres a couple things a month. Anywhere super rural that isn't a college town, I'd be lucky to find dance partners my age.

I'd maybe pick up other hobbies again (I used to play magic the gathering but stopped in college, FNM is in a lot of places), but it's not the same.

oh come on in atlanta there's a fun weekly swing dance in a creepy cabin in the woods. But true, it's nothing like the bay area.

> Meanwhile in the south you can make those same six figures

This isn't true in the slightest. You can easily make double or more in a top tier tech city like SF/SV as you can in the south. My salary is about 7X higher than when I first started in tech over a decade ago at a smaller IT consulting firm (and note that my starting salary was decent for the area, not horribly low-balled). There's no way that would have happened had I stayed where I was instead of moving to a top tier tech city offering the highest salaries.

I'm saving twice as much per year as the average developer in the country makes. That's definitely not possible in the south.

> SV math does not work out

Sure it does. For one, they're taking home an extra thousand dollars per week in SV even after all the taxes. Also, they don't have to live in Birmingham, AL or whatever the hell.

There are some attractive things to some people about living in Birmingham, or abouts.

Your hell hole is other people's heaven; navigable traffic, lakes galore, proximity to clear, warm, clear oceans. Backyards with trees, playsets, green grass.

Warm to hot 10 months of the year.

I would so have a full fab and electronics shop by now if I lived in a place like birmingham.

Last year for thanksgiving we were in Knoxville. Was looking at abandoned warehouses that I could flip. Downtown is tiny but nice and supplemented by the university. I’d have to take up rooting for the vols tho.

Moved from Knoxville to the Bay Area recently. If I had my own startup, it would definitely be in one of those old brick buildings near downtown.

I will say the traffic along the main highway and series of strip malls is not fun though. Nor is the lack of any mass transit to the airport. However rental cars are dirt cheap there.

I was LUSTING over this place though (https://www.google.com/maps/@35.9679553,-83.9199396,3a,60y,4...) was for sale at $2.2M when I was there last year. If only I could sell my house for 2x and I could think of a business to keep that place maintained would be about as dream of a place as I can think of.

Not having to live in SFBA is worth much more than that to quite a few people. In my calculus, it'd be at least $15K a month for me to even think about moving back to SV.

and what would you do with all of that space? In the bay, I am living a bit far out (25 minutes) and tradeoff for a bit more space - but I'm also going out to social events 3-4 times a week. I would not be doing that anywhere else, heck when I was living in DC I only managed 1-2 events a week unless i tried really hard.

Some people prefer saving and looking for other forms of stimulus other than the acquisition of space. For those of us, the fear of living "some place in the south" amounts to:

"The cells just say, 'that's it', and you, the unwary victim of cellular ennui, are quite literally bored to death."

Right, but then you’re in the south, which is why the cost of living is cheaper — it’s not as desirable. And if you’re a marginalized group, it’s not going to be a pleasant place to live.

> you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent

Working a 60 hour/week professional job to live like a 1890s garment factory worker sounds... unappealing.

I lived with roommates until 30. It was fun, it was cheap, and I was able to save a ton in a very short time which allowed me to have a sizable down payment on a house.

Nothing like a garment factory worker.

In your 20s? Who cares. Living with others can be fun. And those 1.5k in rent places are quite nice, they're just not spacious.

Almost nobody who can afford it chooses to live with roommates after college. People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably. Professionals do it in cities like San Francisco and New York because early-career professionals in those cities are financially distressed relative to property owners in those cities.

I feel like this is one of those "filter bubble" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble) scenarios.

There are many young software engineers working at Google/Facebook who would be able to save significantly more than the median US household income per year while renting their own place but still choose to live with roommates.

Only 16% of adults nationwide live with a roommate or other non-relative, and that number is declining since 1995: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/31/more-adults-....

You stated: “People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably.”

This is false for software engineers in the Bay Area. Can they save more by living with roommates? Sure.

But they wouldn’t be “financially distressed” or “unable to save money comfortably” if they didn’t - that is easily verified by looking up new grad salaries and rents in the Bay Area.

It’s simply a rational decision - these are people who were living with roommates in college and by continuing that arrangement can save more, live in a better location w/ more amenities, and quite often share a place with friends - win/win/win.

> It’s simply a rational decision - these are people who were living with roommates in college and by continuing that arrangement can save more, live in a better location w/ more amenities, and quite often share a place with friends - win/win/win.

That's true everywhere. Yet the overwhelming majority choose not to have roommates.

There's selection bias in your analysis. People who are attracted to big cities are more likely to enjoy the company of living with other people, and vice versa.

yeah i don't agree with this. i live alone and spend about the same or a bit more as my friends who live with roommates. they have nicer apartments generally but it's a choice thing in our city (NYC). this is people in early-mid 20s working at faang/banking/consulting.

just a reminder:

https://newrepublic.com/article/113176/science-loneliness-ho...

In addition to salary, you also have the chance of hitting the jackpot when the startup you work at goes public.